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About Credo

Two boys going fishing

Credo is an online repository containing the digital collections held by the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). SCUA presently houses more than 40,000 linear feet of archives and
rare books, the vast majority of which are available only to users who are able to visit our collections in person. In an effort to make these unique materials more widely and freely accessible, SCUA and the Libraries’ Systems Department
began to develop Credo in 2009, with the goal of making the repository a central hub for exploring SCUA’s collections from anywhere at any time.

With the generous support of the Verizon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, SCUA simultaneously embarked upon the massive project of digitizing the complete papers of the African American intellectual and activist,
W.E.B. Du Bois and and thanks to funding from many institutions and the support of the UMass Amherst Libraries, the content in Credo has never stopped growing. Credo now represents the breadth of our collecting interests from university
history to social change, the history of New England, and innovation and entrepreneurship.

Naming our digital repository

In considering a name for our digital repository, we wanted to select something that would hold meaning for a variety of collections, but that would also pay homage to W.E.B. Du Bois, our digital pioneer. First published in 1904, Credo
is a powerful statement of Du Bois's philosophy for achieving racial equality, standing in contrast to the approach taken by many other civil rights activists at the time. Credo speaks to peace, liberty, education, and patience,
qualities that run throughout our many social change collections. To read the full-text, view the original document online, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b227-i010.